People often ask if they can get native SQL Server backup compression using VDI interface. The simple answer is 'yes' but there are few things you need to be aware of as described below. You can get details on VDI by clicking link-to-VDI-Specifications...

I am publishing this Blog on behalf of Hermann Daeubler, our SAP expert
Scenario:
Let’s assume we have a table consisting of five partitions and the one in the middle needs to be dropped. In SQL Server we need the following steps to accomplish this...

Another improved functionality in SQL Server 2008 R2
I am posting this on behalf of Juergen Thomas who has been with SQL Server PM team from 12+ years and is an expert in SAP.
Juergen>> In this article I’d like to talk about another improvement...

When you compress an object (index or table or partition), there are two components of space savings that you get. First component is fragmentaton (i.e. the original object might have been fragmented). The object gets degragmented as part of doing compression...

Now that we have Unicode compression available in SQL Server 2008R2 as described in, let me take a simple example using AdventureWorksDW database to show you the additional compression that can be achieved on tables with one or more columns of type NCHAR...

In my previous blog , I had mentioned that unicode compression will be available as part of next SQL Server release named SQL 2008R2. You can down load the CTP2 version http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/r2.aspx to play with it. This is a new...

As I described in my previous blog , the data compression feature has been very successful. We do appreciate all the feedback that we have received as this provides us a way to know how customers have been using the feature and the challenges they are...

It has been a while since I blogged about data compression so I thought it will be good to provide an update on data compression usage within SQL Server community. I am happy to say that the Data compression feature has been a tremendous success in SQL...

One of the key challenges in TempDB is that it is a common resource for all applications running on an instance and any misbehaving application or rouge user command can take up all the space in TempDB bringing down other applications with it. In my discussions...

This blog continues the discussion on the common issues in TempDB that you may need to troubleshoot. In previous blogs, I discussed how to identify and troubleshoot IO and allocation bottleneck in TempDB. In this blog, I will describe how to indentify...

This blog continues the discussion on the common issues in TempDB that you may need to troubleshoot. In the blog http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlserverstorageengine/archive/2009/01/05/tempdb-monitoring-and-troubleshooting-io-bottleneck.aspx , we discussed how...

I hope my earlier blogs on TempDB (http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlserverstorageengine/archive/tags/TempDB/default.aspx ) have given you a good background on the objects contained in TempDB and its configuration and have deployed your workload in production...

In my previous blogs, I described the types of objects in TempDB and how they are managed. I hope that it provided you with a good working knowledge of TempDB. Now the next question is how do I configure the TempDB for my production workload? In this...

Allocation bottleneck refers to contention in the system pages that store allocation structures. There are three types of pages that store allocation structures as follows
· PFS (Page Free Space): it tracks the following key information about each...

In the previous blog http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlserverstorageengine/archive/2008/12/31/managing-tempdb-in-sql-server-tempdb-basics-version-store-logical-structure.aspx , I described the logical/physical structure of a row in version store. A natural question...

Now that we know a few things about Version Store, let us now look into its structure to understand how it stores rows from different tables/indexes with different schema. Interestingly, you don’t need to look far and the answer is available when...

In order to understand the version store, let me start with an example. I will use a database that has RCSI (read committed snapshot) and SI (Snapshot Isolation) enabled as it provides more controlled environment to manage versions.
When a database...

Version store is a new entity in SQL Server 2005. It is used to store versions of data and index rows. A row version typically is an older copy of the data or an index row and is created to support existing (triggers) and new features (snapshot based...

In the previous blog http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlserverstorageengine/archive/2008/12/21/tempdb-basics.aspx I started the discussion on the TempDB basics and this blog continues it.
TempDB Basics:
· As I indicated, the TempDB is created every time the...

Over past few of years, I have given TempDB presentation in many conferences and the feedback that I have received on TempDB has been very useful. Most of you understand that TempDB is a critical database that needs to be configured carefully otherwise...

In my previous blog http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlserverstorageengine/archive/2008/12/20/enabling-compression-on-a-heap.aspx , I described how to enable compression on a HEAP. You can enable either ROW or PAGE compression on the heap. Let me now describe the...

I often get a question how to do enable compression on a table that is a heap (i.e. it does not have a clustered index). Clearly, one could create the clustered index with compression option set to PAGE and then drop the clustered index. This is an expensive...

Based on the customer feedback, we have decided to make minimal logging functionality into a btree available to SQL 2008 customers. All you need to do is to enable TF-610 in RTM bits. As a cautionary note, we have seen some slowdown if you are loading...

Lately I have been asked how data compression impacts fragmentation (i.e. does it cause more or less fragmentation?). I believe this question is best answered by looking at how does fragmentation occur in the first place and then analyze each of these...